by Sara King
Rat suddenly found it hard to breathe. “But he told me…”
“You were a pawn in one of his power plays,” Sam insisted. “I’m guessing this one involved his nephew, Keval.”
Rat blinked at the device, totally overwhelmed by the betrayal. “Keval?”
“For some reason,” Sam said, “Mekkval seems to think that Keval’s alive and on Earth, planning a coup. Why would that be?”
Rat remembered Keval and Mekkval almost coming to blows over the last time Keval had come back from a successful mission against a rogue prince. The planet he had liberated had decided to throw a parade in his honor, and it had been all over the news. Wave after wave in every corner of the universe had shown Keval graciously accepting slaves and wives before a great audience of Dhasha and Takki. Then one of the Dhasha had begun a chant that Rat could still hear, to this day. Take the seat! A son of Bagkhal should rule! Ke-val! Ke-val! Ke-val!
Keval had excused himself quickly, but the chant had gone on…and it had carried across the galaxy. When Keval had returned to Koliinaat, Mekkval had been in a rage.
“Ka-par!” Mekkval had snarled. “Mahid ka-par!”
Keval had avoided meeting the enraged prince’s eyes. “Uncle, I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m not interested in—”
“Now!” Mekkval had shrieked, batting his nephew in the shoulder hard enough to rip away scales and lodge them into the wall. “You forget yourself, and it is time you learn your place, slave!”
And then, slowly, Keval had looked up. There had been something in his stare that made even Mekkval flinch. With total calm and complete steeliness, Keval had said, “Believe me, uncle. You don’t want to ka-par.” Then he had turned his back to Mekkval and walked away.
Rat, who had stood in mute horror as the two predators had clashed, had nonetheless been shocked when Keval turned his back to Mekkval. It was a sign of such total disrespect, a challenge of the utmost order, that she knew one of them would die that day.
And yet, Mekkval hadn’t attacked. He’d simply let his nephew walk away.
Rat thought about how Keval had almost died in an accident a few days later, how he’d lost twenty children and two wives in the explosion. She thought about how he’d gone to visit Jer’ait Ze’laa and then disappeared for a rotation. Then, when he had returned, Mekkval had told him to ‘put down’ the scientists and their abominations on Earth. And he had, and Mekkval had spent weeks watching his final death-clip, obsessing over every tiny detail…
He was enraged, Rat realized, looking back. He wasn’t feeling guilty for sending Keval to die. He was replaying it because he knew it was fake…
“But Keval doesn’t want the Representative seat,” Rat insisted. “He told Mekkval that.”
“Kitten,” Sam said slowly, “politicians like Mekkval don’t get to the Tribunal by trusting potential rivals. He probably assumed Keval was just buying time so he could challenge.”
But Rat knew that wasn’t true. She’d gone on enough ops with Keval to know that he loved his privacy, his seclusion. And, even stranger for a Dhasha, his wives and children. Politics simply didn’t appeal to him. The idea of him challenging Mekkval for his seat was ludicrous.
And yet… Knowing how shrewd Mekkval was, how suspicious and paranoid, Rat could see where Sam might be right.
“So Keval is on Earth?” Rat asked softly.
“Mekkval seems to believe so,” Sam agreed.
“Why?” Rat whispered.
“You want me to guess?” Sam asked.
Rat felt that sudden odd knowledge that she was standing on a precipice, that to get Sam’s opinion would send her teetering off into dark, unexplored territory she had subconsciously avoided for turns, and it would call the very pillars of her existence into question.
Rat glanced down at the black, egg-shaped object in her hand and said, “Yes.”
“My guess is that your prince Mekkval was the mysterious benefactor financing the experiments on Earth,” Sam said. “And Keval came here looking for proof, then brought it to Koliinaat so he could expose Mekkval’s involvement and depose him. Except Mekkval intervened, tampered with the evidence, and suddenly Earth is entirely to blame. Mekkval then tried to have Keval killed, but Keval knew it was coming and used it to fake his own death so he had more time to look into Mekkval’s wrongdoings. Except he probably didn’t intend to be here for Judgement—I’m guessing that Mekkval gave the order to start Judgement three days early, to keep Keval from leaving and hopefully kill him in the process.”
Remembering the unexpected attack on her ship and the crash that had followed, Rat felt sick. “So Mekkval…caused…all of this?” She didn’t have to ask why Mekkval would have sponsored the experiments—she had seen the regiments of Dhasha die. She was being replaced.
“That’s my guess,” Sam said. “And I’m also guessing the Huouyt are trying to capitalize on it. Mickey told me they tried to kidnap him, get him on a ship…”
But Rat had stopped listening. The knowledge that her prince, her idol, had sown such evil, such strife, then had lied to her about it—it was almost too much to take. She stumbled to the wall and leaned against it.
The action, oddly, made her abdomen twinge in a way it never had before. She glanced down, frowning at the way her shirt was untucked. Confused, she started to lift the hem—
“So,” Sam said quickly, “now that you’re no longer in danger of your head exploding, how about we get out of here and go see how Tyson’s doing, eh?”
“Sam, why—”
But Sam was already throwing his pack over his shoulder, grabbing the female experiment by the hand, and tugging her out of the room, leaving Mickey standing there behind him, looking like a Takki caught stealing from a pantry. And then, before Rat could question him, the wiry, four-foot experiment turned and bolted after his friend.
Faced with going after them or being left alone in a strange room full of incomprehensible medical equipment, Rat followed.
The Assassin
“So you think that’s the real one or the fake one?” Slade asked, as they sat in the bushes and watched Tyson eat one of his hard-earned eggs through Rat’s scope.
“It’s fake,” Tyson said, coming limping up the ridge behind them. “At least, according to the fairy princess.” He hesitated, giving Mickey and Emerald uncertain looks.
“What, waiting for a booted badass to do your dirty work for you?” Rat asked.
Tyson grunted and they both looked at Slade.
Slade ignored the stupid and unnecessary interplay, still scowling at the camp through the scope. “They’re eating my eggs.”
Tyson pulled a gun and put it to the back of Slade’s head. “You got something to say, you say it quickly.”
Slade reached up, pushed the gun away from his braincase, and, without taking his attention from the Huouyt masquerading as the three of them said, “They’re eating my eggs.”
Tyson cocked his head at Rat and raised an eyebrow. “You tell him?”
Rat sighed. “Of course I told him.”
Tyson’s eyes narrowed. “Oh yeah? How long ago?”
Scowling at Slade, she said, “About three minutes.”
“He leave your sight in the last three minutes?” Tyson demanded.
“Nope.”
“Why is it,” Slade muttered, ignoring the thugs and their thuggish exchange, “that every time someone brilliant comes up with something that could save the world, knuckle-dragging idiots have to destroy it?”
Tyson bumped Slade in the back of the head with his gun again. “Say it.”
Slade sighed deeply. He had taken great affront to the ‘mad scientist’ quip and had told Rat that he refused to demean himself that way. Turning to Tyson, he said, “You want proof? Let’s talk about you. You are an anal assassin. An ass bandit. A back door enthusiast. A cock jockey. A poof. A bone smuggler. A brown bat. A mattress muncher. A booty buffer. A turd burglar. A bum-driller. An anal engineer. A butt pirate. A chutney ferr
et. A pole knocker. A hole puncher. A donut muncher. A flaming fruit. A nancy. A fudge packer. A knob jockey. A marmite miner. A pansy. A pillow biter. A poof. A brownie queen. A ring raider. A shit stabber. An analizer. A twink. And a big, blond, super burly, ultra-sexy fairy, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“You said ‘poof’ twice,” Tyson said.
Slade frowned and rewound it in his head. “Huh. So I did.”
Tyson kept the gun trained on his head. “None of those was the password.”
“I hate the password. The password can die.”
“There is nothing wrong with the password!” Rat snapped, for the hundredth time. She turned to face him. “Do you really have to make an issue out of this?”
“You got to be a booted badass,” Slade said. “He got to be gay, which he is. And I get to be crazy?”
“You are crazy,” Tyson and Rat said in unison.
He snorted and crossed his arms. “To mere plebs, it may appear that way. Then again, such is the fate of genius.”
“What’s the password?” Tyson insisted, tapping Slade’s skull.
Rat sighed and shoved Tyson’s gun aside. “Let it go—it’s Sam.”
“I know it’s Sam,” Tyson said. “I just wanna hear the prick say it.”
“Focus,” Rat said. “We need to figure out how we’re going to lure them out.”
Satisfied that his booted badass would protect him from the flaming homosexual with the gun, Slade went back to watching the Huouyt.
The Huouyt was gone.
Pursing his lips, Slade said, “Guys?” He gestured at the empty campsite. “Our egg-thieving friends have vanished.”
Immediately, Rat trained her binoculars around the camp and cursed. “They must have seen us.”
Tyson was dropping to the ground beside Slade, all business now. “They’ll probably be trying to flank us. Should I fall back and take the right?”
“They’ll be coming in from the west. Try to get to the treeline before they—”
Still peering through her scope, Slade frowned. “Ooooorrr they’re engaging in some sort of top-secret conversation with the universe’s most powerful Dhasha and they didn’t want to be disturbed.” He lifted his eye from the scope and pointed to a secluded area out of hearing distance from camp, where five Huouyt were gathered around a projector.
Rat immediately frowned and twisted to get a better look. “It’s Mekkval.” She actually sounded surprised. “He’s talking to Huouyt.”
“Yes,” Slade said. “Which confirms my—”
But Rat was already yanking her rifle out of Slade’s hands and lunging to her feet, leaving Slade, Tyson, and the two experiments huddling on the ridge as she started zig-zagging down through the brush, towards the cluster of assassins.
“You know,” Slade said, watching that, “If she wasn’t such a badass, I’d be worried right now.”
Tyson put the gun back to Slade’s head. “Say it.”
“Dream on, buttburgler,” Slade replied.
#
Rat hovered in the brush at the edge of the gathering, listening to the five Huouyt gathered around the comm device.
“…signal went dead. Have you seen her?” It was her prince, who was being projected before them in all of his resplendent, rainbow-scaled glory, showing none of the unkempt anguish he had shown her before she left for Earth. The hologram appeared to be coming from a rock sitting upon the ground upon some forest detritus.
“One of our brothers must have killed her,” one of the Huouyt said. There were five of them—one Rat, one Sam, one Tyson, and two masquerading as scouts.
“The abomination that she is with dismantled the monitoring device,” Mekkval snapped.
The Huouyt looked at each other. “Then she is as good as dead,” one of them said. “Surgery would have triggered the destruct sequence.”
Mekkval was pacing, now. “We can’t take any chances. I want her dead.”
“You gave her to us to study,” the Huouyt in Rat’s form said. “We’ve already proven that these unnatural Human genes aren’t reliably reproduced with cloning. We need a living sample to take back to Va’ga with us.”
Upon hearing that, Rat felt a spasm of horror. It had to be a lie. Mekkval wouldn’t have betrayed her like that…
“I offered to let you have her if you could use her to flush out Keval. You haven’t flushed out Keval, you don’t get the sample. It’s that simple.”
“We have Keval,” the Huouyt in Sam’s pattern said. “We’ve got him pinned in the mountains. We’ll use her form to get close enough to subdue him.”
“Alive!” Mekkval snapped. “He must be seen alive in order for me to publicly remove his claim.”
“Yes, you’ve said this,” the Huouyt in Rat’s pattern said. “And what we are saying to you is that we have him and his family pinned in a valley less than ten lengths from here, and that he will not be going anywhere. Unfortunately, his Takki have dug him a deep den against the kreenit, and they sealed it. It will take time to get to him and get him out.”
“And my experiments?” Mekkval demanded. “Twelve-A… Has he been rounded up?”
“They…” One of the Huouyt ‘scouts’ glanced at his companions. “…are taking longer to acquire than expected.”
“Why?” Mekkval demanded.
“Dobbs is protecting them,” the Huouyt in Sam’s pattern said. “We sent a team out there to observe, and that was the last thing we heard from them before they disappeared.”
Rat frowned. She couldn’t exactly classify Sam’s blunders as ‘protection’…
“That drunken clown isn’t in any position to protect anything,” Mekkval snapped. “How many were in the team?”
“Eight,” the Huouyt replied. “All of them went silent six days ago.”
“Eight Va’gans against one drunk? They either collected the experiments and betrayed you,” Mekkval said, “or something else killed them. We made sure Dobbs was drinking himself to death. He’s lucky he’s still breathing at this point.”
Rat’s body, which was already straining from the pounding of her heart, began to tremble with rage. The last time she had seen Zero, he had looked like the walking dead. The idea that her prince may have had a role in it left her seething. She had to know why.
“Annoying that you let him seek out your experiments, though,” the Huouyt said. “That makes collecting them both harder.”
“It was that damned Jreet itch,” Mekkval snapped. “I had nothing to do with it.”
The Huouyt glanced at each other again. “Since we are on the subject of Daviin ga Vora… Any word on his whereabouts after your assassination attempt failed?”
“The Regency has a standing order for his arrest,” Mekkval said, bristling. “The worm is hiding under a rock where he belongs.”
And he tried to kill Daviin, Rat thought, anger rapidly progressing into something much worse. One of the fairest, most honest Representatives in Congress and Mekkval had tried to kill him…
The Huouyt wearing Sam’s pattern looked nervous. “Before our team went silent, there was a…mention…of some abnormal mass signatures. Could the Representative be—”
“On Earth?” Mekkval laughed. “Conspiring with Keval? Please. I’d be more concerned that Jer’ait Ze’laa was there with you, rather than that fat worm.”
“Is Jer’ait Ze’laa here with us?” the Huouyt in Tyson’s form demanded. “There’s rumors he went to Va’ga on your urging—”
“Yes, he went to Va’ga,” Mekkval snapped.
“On your urging?” the Huouyt insisted.
“I thought it was a good place to make him disappear,” Mekkval snarled.
“So you say,” the Tyson-Huouyt said calmly. “But I find it…odd…that you would send the Peacemaker to investigate your allies.”
“It was an attempt to get him out of the picture. I thought he could get lost in the labyrinth and no one would be the wiser.” Mekkval made a derisive snort. “It seems I
overestimated the abilities of your ‘best.’”
“So he did come back out again?” For the first time, Rat saw unease in the five Huouyt in front of her. Immediately, the Huouyt in Sam’s pattern reached forward and muted the sound, then turned to the others and said, “If Jer’ait came out of Va’ga alive, we should consider our program compromised.”
“I find it more disturbing that Mekkval tried to put us under the Peacemaker’s microscope,” Rat-Huouyt said.
“We have to assume Jer’ait made it into the prison,” a scout-Huouyt said. “He did it once before, and if he saw what we were doing within the city, he might be here on Earth looking to link the two…”
“If Jer’ait found anything in Va’ga, he would have brought it to the Tribunal,” the other scout said. “If he’s on Earth, it’s more likely he’s here looking for dirt on Mekkval, which we could work to our advantage.”
“Turn the sound back on,” Tyson-Huouyt snapped. “Before the furg suspects.”
Sam-Huouyt reached forward and took the rock-shaped transmitter off Private mode. To Mekkval, he said, “My friends and I are beginning to question your devotion to this cause.”
Mekkval gave an enraged roar. “I gave you Zero and Daviin on a plate, and you botched them both. I gave you Keval and he escaped. Then I gave you Jer’ait—a deformed reject—and you failed to kill him, too.”
“We’ve seen the surveillance following those ‘failures’,” one of the Huouyt snapped. “There is a Baga interfering in each. I am finding it difficult to imagine who else has a Baga in his personal employ than…you?”
“I had Klick killed a turn ago,” Mekkval snarled. “The Baga is not mine.”
Rat’s heart gave a startled hammer, suddenly realizing why Klick hadn’t yet come back from her ‘vacation’ after Glaxxion. Oh no. She thought of her old friend’s final message, the strange paranoia that seemed to be behind the words…
I think something horrible is happening, Klick had written her using the odd venue of their Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying account, and you need to get out if you can. Sol’dan’s right. We’ve outlived our usefulness. At first, Rat had thought it was just Klick in character again, but the Baga hadn’t sent a single thing after that, despite repeated attempts to get her to clarify on Rat’s part.
